We reassess recent and widely reported evidence that the MTV program 16 and Pregnant played a major role in reducing teen birth rates in the U.S. since it began broadcasting in 2009 (Kearney and Levine, American Economic Review 2015). We find Kearney and Levine's identification strategy to be...

Childhood circumstances and behaviours have been shown to have important persistent effects in later life. One aspect of childhood that has changed dramatically in the past decade, and is causing concern among policy makers and other bodies responsible for safeguarding children, is the advent of...

We investigate the relationship between social media use and emotional and behavioural outcomes in adolescence using data from a large and detailed longitudinal study of teenagers from the UK. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study in economics to analyse the effect of social...

Social media has made anonymized behavior online a prevalent part of many people's daily interactions. The implications of this new ability to hide one's identity information remain imperfectly understood. Might it be corrosive to human cooperation? This paper investigates the possibility that a...

We study the reactions to job destructions on Twitter. We use information on large-scale job-destruction and job-creation events announced in the United Kingdom over the period 2013-2018. We match it with data collected on Twitter regarding the number and sentiments of the tweets posted around...

Online technologies enable lower-cost, rapid data collection, but concerns about access and data quality impede their use in global research. I conduct a randomized experiment in the Philippines to test the effectiveness of web-form and chatbot surveys of K–12 teachers recruited through social...

Most teenagers spend several hours per day on social media. We provide a large-scale investigation of the relationship between social media daily usage and body dissatisfaction among a sample of more than 50,000 15 y.o. students. This relation is positive and large for girls—higher use of...

How do modern social movements broaden their base? Prompted by the viral video footage of George Floyd's murder, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement gained unprecedented scope in the spring of 2020. In this paper, we show that pandemic exposure (COVID-19 related deaths) significantly increased...

This paper assesses the results of an experiment designed to identify discrimination in users' following behavior on Twitter. Specifically, we created fictitious bot accounts that resembled humans and claimed to be PhD students in economics. The accounts differed in three characteristics: gender...

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data -...